Sharpening and FUJIFILM’s X-Trans Sensor

If you’ve spent any time in any of the photography forums out there researching the best way to sharpen FUJIFILM’s X-Trans sensor’s RAW files, the ones produced from many (all?) of their X Series cameras, you no doubt have seen the debate around which tool to use and how to sharpen your images without getting the “water color” effect, especially in the foliage and greens. I recently found this excellent post from Pete Bridgewood who explains what the “problem” is as well as how to solve it. In his post he explains,

The DETAIL slider affects how Lightroom processes and emphasises fine details. It does this by changing the bias of which sharpening algorithms are being used. X-Trans files can take a lot of capture sharpening and they like a specific mathematical method known as ‘deconvolution’ sharpening. For my landscape work I find that most images work best with the DETAIL slider set all the way over to the right at 100; my understanding is that when the DETAIL is set to 100, Lightroom uses ‘deconvolution’ algorithms in preference.

I’ve been experimenting with this and have found his post very helpful so far. Using his settings I have created some Presets for Adobe Lightroom that you can download and import so you won’t need to create all of them yourself.